These were some of the darkest days for wolves in North America. North Americans of European descent had beensystematically hunting, trapping, and poisoning wolves forhundreds of years. The US government, through the US Biological Survey, had been actively engaged in a wolf eradication program that was redolent of genocide – or perhaps more accurately ‘genuscide’. Wolf eradicationwent far beyond the presumed ‘practical necessity’ of removing a threat to livelihood. Wolves were, in fact, vilified

and hated. This hatred manifest itself in sometimes gruesome fashion, where wolves would be trapped and systematically tortured to death.

For many people, ‘wolves notonly deserved death but deserved to be punished for living’. Or, as Durward Allen himself put it, ‘To them a

carnivorous animal is not wildlife; he is the enemy of all honest wildlife. The wolfdoesn’t live in the forest; he infests it. You don’t just kill a predator; you execute him. You don’t hunt him for sport; you track him down in a crusade for moral reform’.